The Social Security Administration got punk'd by two people who filed wildly inflated W-2s, maybe as some kind of joke.  The result of the SSA finding is that they had to revise their latest wage numbers:

Removing the phony W-2s reduced total compensation by $32.3 billion or 0.55 percent of all the wages, salaries and bonuses earned by Americans. The total number of people with any work was reduced by two to 150,917,733.

As a result of the revisions, the data show that the average wage in 2009 dollars declined by $457 (not $243), a 1.2 percent decline from 2008. The revision shows that since 2000 the average wage, in 2009 dollars, barely changed in real terms, increasing only $347 or 0.9 percent after nine years.

The median wage – half make more, half less — was unchanged at $26,261. The median is $37 lower than in 2000 and $253 lower than in 2008.

So our country's median wage has declined over the last 10 years?! Add that little tidbit of info to the fact that a good chunk of us are living in houses, our single biggest asset, that are worth significantly less than they were two years ago and I think you begin to see why so many folks are ticked off right now.